Video memories of the 80s

There are many things to remember the eighties by, and on the whole, this is unfortunate. It must be said, of course, that urban middle class life in India was not that bad, but the means that we have of remembering those times, particularly the cinema of the 80s, make things appear much tackier than they might have been at the time. After all, the eighties represented a time of change and the first flush of options appeared on the horizon, as television lost its monochromatic stiffness, the video and cassette boom made entertainment widely accessible and the Maruti rolled into our lives and hearts. The 80s is a time when entertainment burst into our lives, colouring it luridly and unmistakably as we rushed headlong into its embrace having broken free from the drudgery that was Doordarshan. In fact, in the 80s even Doordarshan broke free from itself and gave us its best work.

Time has been uncharacteristically unkind to most things that happened in the 80s. Unlike images of an earlier era, most notably that of the 50s and 60s, which glow with a retrospective majesty best exemplified by the stateliness of the black & white images from a Guru Dutt film, or even of the 70s which ring emotionally true, the mental picture conjured up by the 80s is nothing but a blob of garishness bleeding incoherently on our screens. Our memories of the 80s are worse than the actual experience; for instance, it is widely accepted common wisdom that Hindi cinema reached its nadir in the 80s, both in terms of content as well as form. Between Jeetendra’s dancing and Anil Kapoor’s hair, lay a cultural wasteland punctuated only by Bappi Lahiri’s disco beats. And yet the same decade did produce films like Umrao Jaan, Utsav, Katha, Chasme Buddoor, Massom, Karz, Arth, Ardh Satya to name a few that stand the test of time as well as any film made earlier.

Could it be that the biggest problem faced by the eighties is not what happened then, but that the technology that existed to capture the times diminished it further, pushing it on its way to being caricatured? Could the cassette, in both its audio and video form have permanently ruined this decade for us? For all visual references that we now have of this time depict an era where everything looks blurred and loud. The memory of pirated audio cassettes screeching out T-series music on a loudspeaker on a 2-in-one that played at a slower speed without anyone taking the slightest notice, is enough to revive suicidal thoughts in one’s mind. The quality of reproduction of movies that one saw when using a hired VCR and a severely battered video cassette that was the third copy of a camera print made its content irrelevant. Even the two-in-ones and colour televisions that hosted this content delivered fidelity of the lowest order. At a time when cinema viewing at theatres dropped, films were made with a video audience in mind. The result was that entertainment became the equivalent of everything loud, noisy and patchy.

The cassette explains the 80s better than anything else. A technology that on the one hand, made entertainment widely accessible, as reproduction passed from industrial to consumer hands, and on the other, ensured that quality suffered every time further reproduction took place. The cassette imposes on us an inexorable trade-off between accessibility and quality. It tells us that the mass reproduction kills discernment, and the mainstream must necessarily produce the banal. The cassette erases texture every time it gets copied till at that remains is the gross, that stubborn residue which resists all attempts at erasure, and survives because of its baseness; this is mediocrity that is too coarse to be blunted. The cassette places little value on the original; for it, the original is merely the enabler of the reproduction to follow, it is a technological fact rather than an artistic artefact. In contrast, the digital reproduces without an overt loss of quality and in doing so does not ask us to choose between the popular and the refined.

The cinematic representations of the 80s echoed this lack of discriminating texture. What we saw in our films in particular was the residue of burnt-out emotion, the enactment of dance, the empty spectacle of violence and the intention of music. The 80s film did not believe in the formula that it peddled, for it assembled films rather than conceive them. In the video world of the 80s, perhaps this was sufficient. For the entertainment starved, any simulation of entertainment seemed enough.

The technology of the eighties combined with the first flush of liberalisation produced a profusion that came out of a stunted imagination. Entertainment multiplied by diminishing itself, as technology created a marketplace for the mediocre. The market too operated at its basest, working backwards from what was saleable. It is only towards the end of the decade that cinema rediscovered its imagination, and broke out to a certain extent from the formulaic rut that it had settled into. The images of the 90s are thus more vivid, as the lure of video diminished and the quality of entertainment began to matter again.

The eighties as imprisoned by video, is an account of a time where even the present was recycled, where reality imitated a poor recording of itself. in some ways, the video cinema of the eighties is a mirror where we can we see our worst side, where we are what we can descend to being, without any pretensions. There is a honesty in that, even if the picture is dirty.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" looks at contemporary Indian society from an everyday vantage point. It covers issues big and small, tends where possible to avoid judgmental positions, and tries instead to understand what makes things the way they are. The desire to look at things with innocent doubt helps in the emergence of fresh perspectives and hopefully, of clarity of a new kind.

Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" l. . .